On the Horizon: Swept Away, Menace Beach.

It doesn’t take too much dusting of ye olde grey matter to remember a time at which Leeds was one of, if not British guitar music’s most fecund of breeding grounds. Times have of course since changed a tad, its ideas stagnating and bands since disintegrating, although you’d ultimately be hard pushed to find a better 2013 alternative rock album than Sky Larkin’s Motto, so swings and roundabouts, I suppose. Nonetheless in Menace Beach, a visceral collaborative collision between Loiner vocalists Ryan Needham and Liza Webster, we may witness a changing of the tide: backed by ‘a revolving cast of local luminaries’ including Sky Larkin’s very own Nestor Matthews behind the kit and Hookworms’ MJ out front on lead guitar duties, plus erstwhile Mansun ringleader Paul Draper every now and again, and with freshly spunked ink yet to dry on a Memphis Industries printout, the pair are indisputably churning up something good.

And something thoroughly wicked this way comes in the lo-fi form of Where I Come From, during which the duo, well, menacingly chime in disjointed chorus: “Look me in my eyes, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on!” Drums rattle and distortion roars, a primordial sort of suitably hypnotic proto-punk mischief gradually overwhelming its lattermost moments. “Where I come from, we see how we want to feel/ Where I come from, all we ever wanted was something unreal” Needham begins and repeatedly seethes throughout however, and even if you’re not necessarily getting where every Yorkshire outfit’s coming from contemporarily, we’d wager on your being swept away by these two and the below few minutes…